(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  She began to cry.

  “Hey.” She continued crying, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” he said, a little baffled.

  She shook her head. “Why didn’t they tell me? Why did they let me go on thinking I’d done it? Didn’t they know how I felt?”

  “Sure they knew how you felt.”

  “They didn’t care.”

  He felt curiously spent, having divulged to her a secret he didn’t know he had. “This is the Church we’re talking about.”

  “It’s hateful.” She sat in betrayed silence.

  He said, “I stole a book.”

  A R C D’X • 130

  “What?” she finally answered, preoccupied.

  “They keep it locked away in a vault they never open. It’s a history book. But it’s … another history.” On the mattress he slumped beside her. “The history of our secrets.” He was suddenly tired; he closed his eyes. “The history inside us. And I stole it.” He closed his eyes, waiting for her to say something, and when she didn’t he slowly let himself go to the wine’s languid calm. He was only half aware that the glasses fell from his face. He kept waiting for her to say something. He had told her about the book because he didn’t want to leave her alone with her crime. His body was tense but he let go of that as well; he knew he was collapsing against her and he tried to hold himself back. For a moment he opened his eyes and then he shut them again.

  He was only distantly aware that it had become dark around him. The light beyond the lids of his eyes went black, and he heard the clicking of the light above him in the altar room, the light attached to the string that he thought at first was a web brushing his face. In the rise and fall of her breath next to him he came to believe that, far away, he heard the sound of the sea against the cliffs. He knew he’d fallen asleep when he didn’t hear the all-clear siren but rather remembered it from moments or hours before.

  “It’s the all-clear,” he murmured so long after it happened that even he was vaguely aware his murmuring made no sense.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he told himself, “not in Redemption. Cops don’t come to Redemption anyway.”

  “Redemption,” he finally heard her say in the dark, “is the Church name.”

  “Yes …”

  “Desire,” he heard her say in the dark, “is our name.”

  He nodded, though there was no way she could see that in the dark. “It’s dark,” he said.

  “Do you want me to turn the light back on?”

  “No.” He fumbled for his glasses.

  “They’re here.” He felt her hand him his glasses.

  “Don’t turn on the light.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Are they back?” He meant her husband and child. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the altar-room door.

  She knew whom he meant. “I don’t know.”

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  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “We would probably hear Polly if they were back.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Not in the dark.”

  “Like me.”

  “Maybe someday we’ll go together to the Ice,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “I meant to say that before. But it didn’t seem right.”

  “It seems right.”

  “It didn’t seem right, considering everything.”

  “Considering everything, it seems right.”

  “You should be sure of what you want.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, about having a child. It’s too big not to be sure.” He nodded. She couldn’t see him nodding in the dark. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “There’s something monstrous about my life.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The bigger my life is, the smaller I am in it.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  He dropped his glasses beside him and fumbled until he found her hand.

  “I’ve been owned by everyone,” she said, and in the dark he heard the resolution in her voice. “I’ve been owned by this one and that one, my whole life. And the biggest thing I ever did was to free myself. I did it with a knife. I cut myself loose. And now I find out I didn’t do it after all. Do you understand? I find out I didn’t do it. You’ve freed me today of the burden of having killed a man. But if I didn’t kill him, it means I’m still a slave. God damn everyone who’s ever owned me,” he heard her say. “The police and the priests, and Gann, and the one before him.”

  “The one before him?”

  “Why do I feel close to you? I feel close to you, heart to heart.”

  “I know.”

  “Bedemption is their word,” she said.

  He pulled her to him in the dark, or perhaps she pulled him to her. It was better in the dark, that neither one of them would ever know who had first gone to the other. At first he couldn’t quite dispel from his mind the idea that she could see him in the dark A R C D’X • 132

  even though he couldn’t see her, because he didn’t have his glasses and he couldn’t get over it, the idea that without his glasses he was either blind or invisible. But now that she pulled him to her he knew he wasn’t invisible.

  In the black altar room the air was thick with wine. He clutched her dress; its tones of earth and ash and blood, not unlike the color of her skin, ran between his fingers. The feeling of its cotton, not unlike the touch of her body, ran through his hands. His head pounded with wine and blood. For a moment he thought of the glasses, he worried they would be smashed underneath, and then the idea of it—his smashed glasses—went straight to his head like wine and blood. When he kissed her he emptied wine and blood and the freedom of smashed glasses into her mouth.

  The air was thick with possession. The sound of the wine bottle against the wall was thick with defiance; and then the crash of the altar in the corner, though it sounded very far away, much farther away than the corner, though it sounded like the distant collapse of another altar in another country, was thick with submission. In the dark he felt her breasts fall from her dress. They fell so heavily it shocked him. He wanted to pull the string on the light above and assure himself it was she. But he knew that even with the light on there would be no assurance because he couldn’t have seen her anyway, his eyes spinning like wild blue suns in the sudden light, all their vision leaked into the black of his hair. He caught her beneath him. As he’d been stunned by the heavy fall of her breasts, he was now struck by the speed of her nakedness: possession was everywhere. It opened itself to him, bared its wrists.

  When he took her in the dark of the altar’s ruins they both knew it was more than she’d ever given and more than anyone had ever taken, and that neither was enough. She was touched that Etcher would make love to her so tenderly but she felt no choice except to insist on ferocity: possession was everywhere, and now she demanded it. She’d be restrained by him or, if he couldn’t restrain her, she’d devour him. In their struggle either her best nature, the part of her that spent her whole life coveting freedom, would triumph or her true nature, the part of her that spent her whole life choosing slavery, would abide; and in this moment in the dark she would accept either the triumph or the abiding, whichever it might be, as the truth of who she was, until once again her other STEVE E R I C K S O N • 133

  nature stirred inside her and she wrestled with its relentless nag-ging. “You,” she said, because she couldn’t remember his name,

  “oh you,” she said, waiting for him to claim her. But he wouldn’t do that. The part of him that would enslave her was overwhelmed by the part of him that would free her, if it was up to him to free her, which of course it was not: it had always been up to her to free herself. So he felt her grip him inside, he felt her contractions swirl around his invasion of her; and he would have thought, in the dark, that his hair had gone white, the wine and blood and freedom of smashed glasses rushing to the only moment of him that was real, lashing the uterine pas
sage to that place inside her where nothing is possessed and nothing possesses.

  The tears rolled down her face. He felt them in her hair. No light penetrated the black of the altar room, instead the black rushed from her. It poured from the middle of her, more blackness than she’d ever believed was hers, the truth of her rushing out even as the blackness of the altar room became wan with the tears that rolled down her face. It was only at that moment she realized her wrists were tangled in the string of the light above; and now at the moment she slipped from its bondage, in the jerk of her wrists, the room’s light flashed on and off long enough to leave a small rip in her memory through which she couldn’t bear to look, even as her lover saw everything. And there was that suspension again, not unlike the one they had felt when the all-clear siren had sounded.

  Everything was still, the dark was clear of wine and possession and choices; neither of them could be certain she had said she loved him or he had said he loved her, but all that mattered was that he was sure he had said it and heard it, and she was sure she had said it and heard it, and both were sure it was true. And in the dark there was no telling whether it was wine or tears or blood or the torrent of blackness that passed between them, but in the slick of their love they slipped into each other; and only much later did he hear a little voice on the other side of the altar-room door.

  “Mommy,” it said, and started to open the door, and then another voice, a man’s voice, said, “Don’t open that, Polly.”

  In the dark Sally pulled on her dress. It was intact, untattered.

  Etcher found his glasses; they were intact, unbroken. But everything else was in pieces. “Sally,” he whispered. “Yes,” she whispered back. Beyond the door a child and the child’s father waited.

  A R C D’X • 134

  At that moment Etcher couldn’t be sure he would ever have her again; he grabbed her to him, by her hair. He would have crushed her into him.

  She opened the door and the little girl stood looking up at her.

  It was night, but the curtains had been drawn again, as when Etcher first arrived. Some of the beads and trinkets of the jewelry on the table had been strewn on the floor, where the child had played with them. Gann Hurley was sitting on the couch reading a handbill. He didn’t even look up; to have looked up at his wife and the other man would have been a concession that whatever passed between them mattered to him in the least, that he could be affected by anything that was beyond his control. At the front door Sally stood holding her daughter; for a moment the little girl looked at Etcher and then turned away. Etcher gazed back at Sally in confusion. “Will you be all right?” he finally said.

  “Yes.”

  Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.

  He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in the distance, I cannot do for her. I cannot assume she’ll be mine. I must act on the assumption she’ll never be mine, that it will never be less impossible than it all seems at this moment. I must act on the assumption that I’ll never see her again, except for a passing moment in the street or the Market, and that love has been left hanging in the black space of a small room, and that in the light, with a husband and a child, she’ll feel very different tomorrow, if she doesn’t already. Therefore, whatever I do now ultimately has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the life I’ve been living. It has to do with the man I’ve been and who I am now, without her, and what my life is now, without her.

  He went home and left his wife.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 135

  It had never been in his temperament to understand power. In all of his passivity he had never felt the oppression of other people’s power over him, which was why he resigned himself so easily to it; his resignation was born not from his fear of others, after all, but himself. Nor was it in his temperament to revel in power, which was why he had never understood why women like Synthia needed him to exert power over them. He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn’t have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn’t last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn’t free.

  Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.

  Etcher didn’t tell Tedi about Sally, because when he left Tedi it wasn’t about Sally. When he left Tedi he didn’t believe anything would ever happen between him and Sally. What happened between Etcher and Tedi was about Etcher and Tedi, and in his new power he tried to leave Tedi without abandoning her, if such a thing was possible. But he came to recognize the limits of leaving without abandoning. For months afterward, he would go by Tedi’s classroom—with the children and the blackboard and the shelves of books and bibles and texts—to marvel at the limits and power of her rage. He understood that this may have helped nothing. He understood that something about his enlistment of Tedi as a co-conspirator in his own leaving might be dishonest and cruel, and that he couldn’t deny her the right to her rage. Sometimes, outside the school, in the windowless downtown street, he took the full force of her fury as her efforts to contain that fury broke down and she broke down with them, the spectacle interrupted only by an occasional passerby. The best Etcher could do was promise not to lie to himself. He wouldn’t pretend it was all her fault, or pretend her pain was less than it was, or tell himself she was better off. He didn’t believe she was better off. He believed that in meeting her and being with her he had accepted responsibility for her heart A R C D’X • 136

  and its dreams, whether or not that was something any person could rightly do for another, and had now broken those things; when she ran from the street crying he was left with the sound of the shattering, her dreams in pieces on the ground, the sound of them crunching beneath his feet like glass as he walked away.

  Two months after his marriage ended, Etcher left Church Central one night to the smell of wine in the air. All the way down the rock he smelled it. The wind brought it from the sea to the west through the windows of the lift, as though it were a red-wine sea beyond the shore rolling in and out to the pull of a red drunk moon beyond the Vog. Etcher might have thought he wanted a drink. He couldn’t remember the last drink. Yes he did. Sure he remembered the last drink. He remembered the bottle of wine in the corner of the little altar room, the sound of it in the dark. It was better to believe that the smell of wine in the night air only meant that he needed a drink; he preferred to believe that. He needed to believe it had nothing at all to do with that last time. At this moment Etcher might have craved a drink even though he hadn’t drunk anything in a long time, because it was easier to deal with his thirst than his hunger. If he had believed in omens he might have known, coming down the rock on the lift, what was there at the bottom. And if the smell of wine from the sea wasn’t omen enough, there was, when he stepped from the lift, the empty robe lying in the path. It was a priest’s white robe. Etcher had never seen one just lying on the ground like this, as though the person inside it had suddenly vanished. The wind carried it a couple of feet. Etcher picked it up. Once he would have cast it away immediately, as though it would implicate him in some crime. But now he casually threw the robe over his shoulders and walked on, and not much further from where he’d picked up the robe, at the bottom of the rock, he found Sally waiting for him, her hair blowing like a wild ash weed in the wine wind.

  “I couldn’t get you out of my head,” she said.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  He asked it as though they had made some appointment hours or days or weeks before that she hadn’t kept. He had imagined seeing her so many times that to see her now in the night and the Vog was somehow utterly expected and utterly unreal at the same time. It was so exhilarating it frightened him. He would have set-STEVE E R I C K S O N • 137

  tied for just this opportunity to see her and
hear her tell him, “I couldn’t get you out of my head,” and then watch her walk away.

  But she didn’t walk away. There was no way of being sure she was happy to be there; she didn’t appear happy or unhappy. At the bottom of the rock, on the base of the path that led to the lift, she was as dark as the night around her, she was blacker than he’d seen before, even in the black of her altar room. She was beautiful in that chemistry of her soul by which torment lit her beauty, the only light of her being the light in her eyes, and they walked along the cliffs in the night until they passed the point where a small wooden fence ran out and there was no fence at all, just the rocks and the emptiness beyond them, the plummet to oblivion at the border of where they now loved each other and every embrace was a risk.

  When she became cold he wrapped her in the white robe of the priest. He didn’t notice anymore if the sea smelled of wine. “I’m leaving Gann,” she told him. He didn’t say, “Good” or “I’m glad,”

  he only nodded, and the Vog leaked from the place where they stood as though that place was scorched by their heresy, rolling out across the cliffs and up the coast. It was the first and only moment Etcher ever believed Aeonopolis had succumbed to the rest of time, which in turn had succumbed to a magic rage wild beyond the fingertips of magicians: and Sally and Etcher didn’t presume to hold that moment, they didn’t wish to stop it as lovers do. They knew the moment wouldn’t wait for them. They knew it would go on spinning out from beneath their feet all the way out to sea for as far as they could see. They merely hoped to get as far as the momentum of the moment would take them, to distill the fury of their heresy into a thrust that would propel them over every moment that hadn’t already been reduced to shambles by her astonishing face. It was a heresy that broke ten spells in exchange for the one it cast. Standing where they stood with the sea and the Vog and the night at their backs, in his arms she gazed up at him and cried out, “But you look so … happy,” though she meant something more, she meant a frightening rapture, and though she understood his love she didn’t understand his faith, and if he couldn’t persuade her to share his faith he shared her incomprehension of it, and wondered at his desire to possess beauty and own it, because he never really believed it was possible. He didn’t A R C D’X • 138